Bilingual Insights into the Initial Lexicon

The Role of Cognates in Word Acquisition

Gonzalo Garcia-Castro

PhD Defence / Departament de Medicina i Ciències de la Vida

2024-11-03

Overview

  1. Introduction
    • From sounds to lexical representations
    • Vocabulary spurt
    • Early dynamics of lexical processing
    • Challenges of a bilingual environment
    • A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?
  2. Study 1: AMBLA model, acquisition of cognates, role of language exposure3
  3. Study 2: language non-selectivity in the initial bilingual lexicon
  4. Discussion

From sounds to lexical representations

Average English-native 20-year-old knows ~42,000 words: mental lexicon

Lexical representations
Phonological, conceptual, grammatical information of known words
Form-meaning association

Lexical development:

From sounds to lexical representations

From sounds to lexical representations

Inter-modal experimental paradigms

(Bergelson and Swingley 2012, 2015; Tincoff and Jusczyk 1999, 2012)

Bergelson and Swingley (2012), Science News

Parental reports and surveys

e.g., MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) (Fenson et al. 1994)

Fenson et al. (1994)

Vocabulary growth

Vocabulary size grows non-linearly during the second year of life

Figure 1: Vocabulary size norms for 51,800 monolingual children learning 35 distinct languages (wordbank)

Early dynamics of lexical processing

Cascaded activation: activation spreads across non-selected lexical representations (Allopenna, Magnuson, and Tanenhaus 1998)


In children (Chow, Davies, and Plunkett 2017)

Challenges of a bilingual environment

  • Increased complexity in linguistic context (learning two codes)
  • Reduced linguistic input (split into two languages)
  • Increased referential ambiguity
  • Bilinguals keep up with monolinguals (Sebastian-Galles and Santolin 2020)

Challenges of a bilingual environment

Bilinguals acquire words at similar rates as monolinguals (Hoff et al. 2012)

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Lexically closer languages ➡️ Larger vocabulary size (Floccia et al. 2018)

English-Dutch > English-Mandarin

Cognate: form-similar translation equivalents (TEs)

Cognate Non-cognate
[cat] /ˈgat-ˈgato/ [dog] /ˈgos-ˈpe.ro/

Cognates acquired earlier than non-cognates (Mitchell, Tsui, and Byers-Heinlein 2023; Bosch and Ramon-Casas 2014)

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Figure 2: Pairwise lexical similarity (average Levensthein similarity across translations).

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Figure 3: Aggregated vocabularies might conceal facilitation effects

What mechanisms support a cognate facilitation during word acquisition?

Language non-selective lexical access

Study 1

Cognate beginnings to lexical acquisition

Introduction

  • Bilinguals keep up with monolinguals in vocabulary growth
  • The presence of cognates seems to facilitate vocabulary acquisition
  • Language co-activation has been suggested to underlie this phenomenon
  • Mechanisms supporting the role of co-activation in cognate acquisition are unclear

Language non-selectivity

Activation spreads across non-selected representations in both languages, through phonological and conceptual links. (e.g., Costa, Caramazza, and Sebastian-Galles 2000)

Evidence in children (Bosma and Nota 2020; De Houwer, Bornstein, and Putnick 2014) and infants (Von Holzen and Mani 2012; Jardak and Byers-Heinlein 2019; Singh 2014).

Language non-selectivity

Language non-selectivity

The AMBLA model

Accumulator Model of Bilingual Lexical Acquisition (AMBLA)

  1. Information about form-meaning mappings is provided by learning instances.
  • Exposure to a word-form that results in the accumulation of information about its meaning
  1. Age of acquisition: the infant accumulates a threshold (\(c\)) amount of learning instances for a word-form

\[ \begin{aligned} \definecolor{myred}{RGB}{ 168, 0, 53 } \definecolor{myblue}{RGB}{ 0, 64, 168 } \definecolor{mygreen}{RGB}{0, 168, 87} \definecolor{grey}{RGB}{128, 128, 128} \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ {\color{mygreen}\text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij}} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid {\color{myred}\text{Learning instances}_{ij}} = {\color{myblue}c} \}\\ \color{myred}{\text{Learning instances}_{ij}} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \\ \textbf{where:} \\ {\color{myblue}c} &= 300 \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \end{aligned} \]

Extended to the bilingual case:

  1. Linguistic input divided into two languages

Exposure: proportion of time exposed to the language of \(j\) word

Accumulation of learning instances, a function of Exposure and Frequency.

\[ \begin{aligned} \definecolor{myred}{RGB}{ 168, 0, 53 } \definecolor{myblue}{RGB}{ 0, 64, 168 } \definecolor{mygreen}{RGB}{0, 168, 87} \definecolor{myorange}{RGB}{ 235, 127, 26 } \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c \}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \cdot {\color{myred}\text{Exposure}_{ij}}\\ \textbf{where:} \\ c &= 300 \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \end{aligned} \]

Implementing a cognateness facilitation mechanism:

  1. Words may accumulate additional learning instances from the co-activation of their (phonologically similar) translation equivalent

Degree proportional to their phonological similarity (Cognateness)

\[ \begin{aligned} \definecolor{myred}{RGB}{ 168, 0, 53 } \definecolor{myblue}{RGB}{ 0, 64, 168 } \definecolor{mygreen}{RGB}{0, 168, 87} \definecolor{myorange}{RGB}{ 235, 127, 26 } \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c \}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \cdot \text{Exposure}_{ij} \cdot {\color{myred}\text{Cognateness}_{j}}\\ \textbf{where:} \\ c &= 300 \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \\ {\color{myred}\text{Cognateness}}&{\color{myred}=\text{Levenshtein}(j, j')} \end{aligned} \]

Methods

Barcelona Vocabulary Questionnaire (BVQ)

Participants

Data processing

Modelling approach and statistical inference

Results

Regression coefficients

Figure 4: Posterior distribution of fixed regression coefficients

Marginal effects

Figure 5: Posterior marginal effects

Discussion

Study 2

Developmental trajectories of bilingual spoken word recognition

Introduction

Experiment 1

N = 112 children (15 longitudinal)

Average age 26.36 months (SD = 4.01, Range = 20.03–32.5)

English monolinguals, Oxford (United Kindgom)

Figure 6: Participant receptive vocabulary sizes across ages and language profiles.

Design

Results

Figure 7: Time course of target fixations in Experiment 1.

Experiment 2

Participants

Stimuli

Procedure

Results (monolinguals)

Figure 8: Time course of target fixations in Experiment 1.

Results (bilinguals)

Figure 9: Time course of target fixations in Experiment 1.

Discussion

Thanks

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